Vista Experiment Dual booting XP, Part 3

So I successfully have a system that dual boots XP SP3 and Ubuntu 8.10. It took a bit of fiddling and research on how to properly configure the GRUB bootloader to recognize where XP's partition was and that it was something bootable.

Like anything Ubuntu related, I found the correct answer through the Ubuntu Forums. It's threads like this one that make Ubuntu Forums such a worthwhile resource. Not only is the user base pro active and helpful, it's large enough that about 95% of any problems you come across running Ubuntu have already been posted and solved. Even when I transitioned to 8.10 a few weeks early I found that there was already a great deal of posting about how to get just about everything working even with beta software.

At the end of the day computers are far too useful to be held down by only one OS. There are things that are easily done in linux that just don't work as well in Windows. On the other hand, Linux, no matter what the distribution, can produce real headaches and lots of time configuring and rebooting to diagnose a problem--and most of the time its something like a proprietary video driver that you wouldn't have to spend but a few seconds on in Windows to get it functioning.

I've been part of the linux community since about 1999 and have participated in varying degrees. Just recently I've become involved in posting on the forums when I can help diagnose a problem, but most of my experience is that of the end-user. I can't stress enough how happy I am with how the linux community has developed and I feel like the OS is finally getting to a point of maturity that would allow it to be used by just about any average user. It's still going to remain the choice of true enthusiasts though, because its free and legal and ultimately incredibly scalable.

The relative ease of installing and dual booting XP was a pleasant surprise, and I'm actually impressed at the boot time of the tidied up repack of SP3 that I ended up loading. I'm looking forward to getting Photoshop up and running and finally getting to stretch the legs of the graphics card I bought a few months ago. I don't think I'll be able to run super-current games, but I look forward to installing some classics that I used to play (Black & White, anyone?) and see what I can throw at it before it breaks.

Also, this really wouldn't have happened if not for this article over at APCmag, which gave me the courage to go ahead and take the plunge and commit to the install. They're actually got a whole series of articles about dual booting. If you're a Windows user that wants to see what this whole linux thing is, or a linux user that's a little unsure when it comes to partition tables, it's really never been a more straight-forward process to dual boot your PC.

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Vista Experiment, Part 2: Epic Fail

So none of the Vista disks I have want to load on my system. At all. Therefore, I switched to XP Professional SP3, which is installing now.

The only thing thats kind of a drag about the install is that I had to disconnect my IDE hard drive because Windows doesn't take kindly to being installed on a second disk unless it gets to write on the Master Boot Record of the main drive. Needless to say, it will be a bit easier to make changes to Grub once I install, without having to use a live cd to get let back into your OS.

Currently formating the 50gb I left free on my new SATA drive to, wretch, NTFS via the XP good ole' text based installer. XP is what I have to use at work, and I'm really only installing it because I have the extra space now. Worst case scenario is that I lose the 50 or so gb that I'v written on the first partition of the new disk, but I find that to be not very likely.

Just a couple of notes on the install so far:

I'd almost forgotten how far Linux distros have come in the last few years in terms of ease of use. Windows seems incredibly painful just even getting it off its feet, and this is software that you have to pay for.

The fact that Vista just said "No," to my hardware doesn't do much to reaffirm my faith in Microsoft. I'm hopeful that Windows 7 will buck the trend started by Vista. I thought MS was all about hardware compatibility anyway. Or at least that's the impression I get from the fanboys, however few of them are left.

It's funny too that my failed Vista install happened today, hot on the heels of this article at PCWorld, about how XP is refusing to fall by wayside behind Vista.

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Vista Experiment, Part 1

Well to start off, the name of the this post is a bit of a misnomer since I haven't been able to successfully get it up and running on my computer yet. I'm trying one more disk before I go tried and true with XP. So far, three different versions of Vista have failed to even boot for me, BSOD'ing after the initial load from the disk.

Granted, if this had happend with a linux distro, I'd probably been able to scour forums and find at least something relevant to whatever issue was causing the system to lock up before it even got interesting. So I'm just waiting on the next discs to arrive, and I'm thinking I might just go the complete opposite direction and load another linux distribution onto the extra partition I've left on my new 500gb SATA drive. I'd forgotten that non-ancient harddrives run whisper quiet compared to the grinding cacophony that comes out of my older hardware.

So Vista, you're losing the challenge of making me ignore all the bad hype. The only reason I have to run Windows anyway is that I want to have issue-free installs of the newest Adobe Products on my desktop, because doing graphics-anything on my laptop really sucks.

Also, after spending a few days getting acquainted with our editing comp at the office, I desperately want to bring some sanity to its heavily disorganized workflow. Multiple User Accounts on one machine running OS X = bad.

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Wine in Ubuntu is the best!

Wine allowed me to install a certain proprietary piece of windows only software (starts with an eff and ends in an assssh) to get some crucial web development work done yesterday when I was home sick. It didn't work with the most current version, which means that I'll have to go back and redo some stuff with the 8-core screamer at the Mito office, but I made some major progress with the software none the less.

If you're not a linux user, that means that there's no reason for you to know about Wine, but essentially it provides a layer of functionality to your linux setup--the ability to run windows programs seemlessly. Mac users know that this has been possible since the OS 9 days, but it requires a layer of processor hogging OS emulation, and hasn't really been a viable option until the recent releases of vmware Fusion and Parallels 4 (3 was ok too). On the mac tip, I use vmware Fusion and love it!

The main problem with emulating the entire OS is that it really is a burden on your processor and your ram comsumption, in addition to requiring booting or unfreezing before you can start using it. Also, it requires a copy of Windows to install on top of the copy of vmware or Paralells you purchased. Wine acts as an Windows API layer over X in Linux, bypassing the need to purchase an OS that you don't really want.

In the past, Wine has been somewhat a piece of vaporware, due to the uber-nerd L337 skillz to get it up and running. I had bad luck ever getting it to run back in the glory days of RedHat 6, 7 and 8, but now with the ease of apt-get in Ubuntu, Wine is preconfigured and precompiled via automatic updates. It's still a little shakey, but I've successfully been able to run quite a few programs that I thought would be doomed to a Windows partition.

Oh, and on the computer front, the 500gb harddrive I ordered on sunday should be here by the weekend (fingers crossed). At only $60 it was a steal! I'm looking forward towards giving Vista the ole' college try with 100gb partition. I'll post my travails in the Windows world once I start tinkering.

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